Please visit my blog which has moved here since this gave me better control over the look and feel of my page.
“Perhaps, Sir, you will some day come back with books.” These were the words which changed John Wood’s life and they came from a village school headmaster in Nepal, who he met during the course of his trek through the Himalayas.
I have just finished reading his book “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World” overnight and to say the least, its a very inspirational journey.
John Wood was a very senior executive who left Microsoft to start a wonderful organisation called Room to Read: http://www.roomtoread.org/about/history.html
This book tells the story of how John created and built this organisation. It’s an incredible story of how a chance encounter and an open mind can change lives. It’s also the the story of the difference one individual can make.
He is a master story teller and holds the reader’s interest throughout, peppering the book with real life stories, anecdotes from the field, his take on what an individual can do and photos of happy children and infectious smiles.
Good book, fantastic organisation and a man with a purpose !
The Basics
Hosting: Using Hosting services, you bought fixed storage and fixed bandwidth from a 3rd party and hosted your website/applications. In turn, the 3rd party would ensure uptime and maintenance. You didn’t bother about maintaining the hardware or the application but paid for a fixed amount of processing power/storage/space irrespective of whether you needed it or not.
Cloud computing: Visualise your laptop (or desktop) and all its contents as being somewhere on the internet (in a big beautiful, pristine white ‘cottony’ cloud), managed and cared for by someone. That someone also provides you with the applications that you need (Word Processing, Spreadsheets etc), stores all your data for you and ensures your part of the cloud is kept up and running at all times. This effectively means as a user, all you need is a browser to be able to access all the information that you need. You could access it from a Mac, a PC, a mobile, a Smartphone, anytime, anywhere.
From a corporate perspective, this is fantastic since this is like computing-on-tap or pay-as-you-go and ideally, there is no need for hardware contracts, maintenance etc. Pushing the envelope on that thought, that could bring into question the role of the IT department. Sobering thought !
Cloud computing differs from typical Web Hosting, because web hosting gives you a fixed server or a portion of a single server, where cloud computing gives you the benefit of many servers all working together as one. Your particular website or application may only need one small portion of a single server, so there’s no need to get a dedicated server. Those servers sit on, consuming power and space even if it isn’t needed.
Where cloud computing really offers benefits is when a website or application gets hit with a lot of traffic in a very short amount of time. This is because Amazon/Google/Mosso have additional capacity, beyond a single server, to serve the website or application. If the hits come in a massive wave, The Cloud automatically distributes the load to multiple servers. When the hits subside, the website/application is taken off those additional servers, freeing up computing space for other websites/applications.
The personal avatar of Cloud computing is webOS’. Sites like http://g.ho.st, http://eyeos.org move everything- applications, files, and communications- from the confines of your laptop/desktop to the more widely accessible Internet.
One could argue that a Web-based operating system is redundant, since one needs a computer, operating system, and Web browser to access an online operating system. While that’s true, the point of an online operating system is complete environment portability. That means being able to log on to any device/computer that has an Internet connection and, in the time it takes to launch your Web OS, having all of your applications and documents ready for you to resume work.
For more information on Cloud Computing and Hosting check out:
http://www.qrimp.com/blog/blog.The-difference-between-Web-Hosting-and-Cloud-Computing.html
http://www.illuminata.com/perspectives/?p=467
http://www.illuminata.com/cgi-local/pub.cgi?docid=andefinecloud
http://blog.rightscale.com/2008/05/26/define-cloud-computing
For Web-based OS, check out
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3892075.cms
